OpenAjax Metadata (OAM) defines a set of industry-standard metadata for Ajax widgets and Ajax APIs that promote interoperability across Ajax toolkits and Ajax products. In general, Ajax toolkits will produce OAM files (directly or indirectly using post-processing utilities) and Ajax IDEs will consume OAM files.

The IDE Working Group, in conformance with its charter, delivered the following specifications and open source:

A complete and detailed formal Specification (the OpenAjax Metadata 1.0 Specification). This specification went through three separate detailed editorial reviews and multiple products have implemented major parts of the specification over the past couple of years.

Open source implementations at OpenAjax Alliance of major parts of the spec:

Sample OpenAjax widgets, available within the alliance’s open source project

A multiple-vendor interoperability event in 2008 (the 2008 InteropFest where various companies integrated their products and technologies with OpenAjax Hub and OpenAjax Widgets (see press announcement)

Beyond the open source implementations done within OpenAjax Alliance listed above, we know of the following other implementations of key features found in the spec:

The widget features are supported by Adobe Dreamweaver CS4 and are the preferred format for 3rd party widget extensions. The Dreamweaver Exchange contains 3rd party widgets defined in OAM format that use a variety of Ajax toolkits, including jQuery UI.

The widget features are supported by multiple IBM commercial products and research projects, including Rational Application Developer (RAD) and IBM Mashup Center. RAD includes a complete collection of Dojo’s widgets (from the Dijit library) expressed in OAM format.

Eclipse Foundation has an open source implementation of the OAM JavaScript API features within the JSDT component that is a standard piece of the Web Tools Project.